A Brief History of This Site’s Browser Requirements

This website has existed only since January 2007. Only then did I finally get
round to realising that I ought to have a “proper” presence on the World Wide Web.
There was an old site from ten years earlier, but it was just a folder at an Internet
Service Provider, without even its own domain name. It was never intended as more
than a loose collection of occasional writing to help promote my
consultation services. Even then, it lay dormant
for nearly five years until revived in 2004 for a research project that I tried
to write-up-as-you-go-along. After another such project a couple of years later,
the old site had grown to a thousand pages. (For the record, the old site was accessible
as www.ozemail.com.au/~geoffch until its discontinuation in April 2011.)

Formal help for my readers to find their way around all that material at the
old site had always seemed well beyond my means. After all, I am not an “HTML author”
or “web designer” and haven’t any more interest in becoming one than I have in becoming
an expert at the macro language of any word processor. The best it seemed I could
do was to place at the top and bottom of every page a chain of up-links through
the site’s directory tree.

That truly was unreasonable of me. I myself dislike intensely those many websites
that exist to present reference material yet constrain their readers to follow links
from page to page with no overview easily to hand. The whole point to reference
material, at least in a subject that is rich in interesting content, is that readers
may connect information in ways that the author thought unlikely, or even in ways
that simply never would have occurred to the author. It just does not make sense
to me that the links on each page of a large collection can be the sole guide to
that page’s relationship with other pages.

Unsurprisingly then, I have gone to the other extreme and removed all navigational
support from all document pages. Of course, where the text of a document cites something
that is described in greater detail on another page, there is a link in place. Such
links are surely the essence of the web. But those clumsy chains of up-links are
gone, as are any other links that looked like inventions of necessity. Instead,
I provide you with what I think are easy means to see what’s here. A dynamic table
of contents (TOC) lets you take in my arrangement of the site but also concentrate
on whatever bits of it interest you.

Much to my surprise, it turns out that a satisfactory table of contents is far
from trivial for a web site, at least it is if you want useful behaviour without
expecting your readers to let you keep your TOC’s state—or, worse, execute your
code—on their machines. Though the old site was very near to being completely dumb,
this new site does have browser requirements.